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Wednesday, 8 June 2016

ROAD WARRIOR! (probably my most popular stand-up routine from the early days)

This post was my single most popular humour
column/stand-up routine (with appropriate gestures) back in the days
when I wrote under Funny Girl.

(With apologies to gorillas.)

Who needs a telephone booth? My guy can step into any car and become: ROAD WARRIOR!

There
must be a primitive instinct that overcomes a male each time he gets
behind the wheel of a car, and which also makes him forget that he
actually got beyond the evolutionary stage of the giant African
gorilla.

Because every day, millions of men the world
over climb into their twenty-first century chariots of steel to hear a
voice from the heavens proclaim, “Gentlemen, start your engines!” At
which point all lads who possess a scrap of testosterone drop into
first, stomp on the gas and lay a trail of smoking rubber in an attempt
to beat the other blokes away from the lights.

I
can remember traveling in my guy’s car down Gerrard street one day,
when a red Camaro, which was traveling about two miles an hour faster
than we were, pulled up beside us and tried to pass. Whereupon, the man
I promised to love and honour until death do us part – or at least
until the next tax year – stepped on the gas and roared up the street
doing a wheelie, in case, of course, the Camaro might just DARE to cut
in front.

The
driver of the red Camaro, not wishing to appear shortchanged on his
giant gorilla genes, immediately dashed up alongside, and proceeded to
make extremely rude hand gestures while shifting gears and controlling a
skid, all at the same time.

The
two cars jerked their way down Gerrard, both drivers screaming at each
other through closed windows, until my own true love slammed on the
brakes, effectively blocking two lanes of traffic and the entire Jarvis
Street intersection. He then got out of the car.

Now
the occupants of the Camaro were the sort of people one would expect to
see driving a red Camaro down Gerrard: guys with names like Carlos and
Guido, whose idea of a fun Saturday night is counting the notches on
their machine guns. And if I hadn’t started screaming and fainting in
the manner of Fay Wray with King Kong (another gorilla) we would
probably all still be there; my guy standing out in the middle of the
intersection flailing his arms, ready to “teach them a lesson.”